Ed Gorman's Blog, page 199

Career overview: Harry Landers

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Ed here: I'm a big fan of career over views, especially of writers, actors, directors. You may not know the name Harry Landers but unless you've never watched TV you've seen him. From Hitchcock to DeMille from a major role in Ben Casey to dozens of hours of TV dramas of all kinds, Landers talks about his acting days with candor and edge. Thanks to Cinema Retro for the link.

This appeared on The Classic TV History Blog:

Harry Landers:

"So I grabbed a t-shirt and put it on, and got into the limo. Now I was fear-ridden. On the ship, I wasn't. How old was I? I was in my early twenties, I guess. I remembered Bette Davis as a kid, watching her movies. To this day, I think she's still the motion picture actress in American cinema. She's incredible.

"So they asked me onto the stage, to Bette Davis's dressing room. They were shooting. There was a camera and all the sets. The man went up and said, "Miss Davis, I have the young man." So she said, "Come in, come in." I walked in and there she was, seated in front of the mirror. She looked at me and shook my hand. She asked me a few questions. She said, "What can I do for you?"

"Maybe when I was a kid in New York City, in Brooklyn, I always realized I'd wind up in Hollywood someday. I never knew why or what, but it was a magnet. Motion pictures is better than sex! And she said, "What can I do for you?"

"I used to watch the extras. Beautiful little girls walking around, and they were always rather well-dressed and doing nothing, and I'm sweating and pounding nails. And they were making more money. I think I was making like nine or ten dollars a day. I said, "I'd like to do what they're doing."

"She said, "You want to be an extra?"

I said, "Yes, ma'am."

"Then she picked up the phone and she spoke to Pat Somerset at the Screen Actors Guild. Put the phone down. A few seconds later the phone rang. She said, "Yes, Pat. Bette here. I have a young man here, and I will pay his initiation." That was the end of it. She told me where to go. She wrote it down: The Screen Actors Guild union on Hollywood and La Brea. We talked for maybe three more sentences, said goodbye and shook hands.

"The next time I ran across Bette Davis was at a party at Greer Garson's house. By that time many years had passed; in fact, I was in Ben Casey. I was with Sam Jaffe and Bettye Ackerman. They knew Greer – Miss Garson – very well. There was Bette Davis, and she didn't remember me. I [reminded her and] a little thing flicked in her mind. It was just a very brief kind of a [memory]. That was the last time I ever saw her."



for the rest go here:
http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com...

Joel Rosenberg, R.I. P.

Joel Rosenberg – husband, father, mensch (From Joel's website) from his wife Felicia

On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37pm Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation.

He is survived by his daughters, Judith Eleanor and Rachel Hannah, and his wife, Felicia Herman. Today, June 3rd would have been his 32nd wedding anniversary.

Ed here: I've always been a fan of Joel's fiction. In the eighties I had the pleasure of meeting him at an sf convention. We had a long talk and a lot of laughs. A good and very decent man and a fine fine writer. My condolences to his family.

Forgotten Books: The Wrath of God

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The Wrath of God

I'm rereading The Wrath of God by Jack Higgins (originally published as by James Graham and some of those editions are still around) one of my favorite adventure novels by one of my favorite adventure writers.

The early Higgins novels hold up extremely well mixing, as they do, protagonists bitter over the Irish troubles, ready to fight even kill if necessary and and always aware of how corrupt political systems are.

Wrath is set in Mexico during the time of the Revolution at the start of the last century. It is a frightening book in its take on humanity and political beliefs. The murderous priest who is not a priest, the obscene mobster-type, the devious officers of the regular Army...and of course the slaughter of innocents. If the book wasn't so page-turning exciting and filled with numrous switch-backs in the plotting you'd realize how despairing it really is.

A fine harsh believable novel about political systems then and--alas--now.

I found an interesting Australian interview with Higgins, a part of which I'm quoting here:

Which writers have inspired you?

"There are writers I've read, at a literary level, who write different kinds of books than me. I suppose that when I was trying to hone my skills, I very much admired Graham Greene. I admired classic writers, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was never a Hemingway fan. But, in terms of thriller writers I always admired Alistair Maclean at his best – HMS Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare. Years later when his health wasn't good, a few of the novels became shorter and thinner, but that was because at that stage he found it more convenient to write them as film scripts.

"He was very good to me because once I was coming out of the Collins offices and my name was shouted; I turned around and it was Maclean, and he'd been in the building and he'd asked the receptionist who I was. So he came out and called to me and insisted that we had a drink, and we sat in the pub. He simply said, "I've read your book and you've really got big potential. I think you're going to make it in a big way". Then we had a general chat about life and publishing, where he made a few points that I'll always remember: that he'd given up reading reviews, that people will put you down because you're not writing a Booker Prize book, you're writing a thriller.

And he said, "after all I have an MA in English Literature from Glasgow University." So he said, "I'm hardly a fool." He said to me, "What about you?" "Well yes, in fact, I'm a Senior Lecturer at a university." I saw him again quite a long time later, and he liked The Eagle Has Landed so much he gave us a great puff, which stayed on the cover for years. Nice man. His work at his best was definitely an inspiration."

New Books: Camouflage by Bill Pronzini

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(I apologize for not having a graphic of the book. For some reason I couldn't reproduce it here.)

Grand Master Bill Pronzini has never been better than in his new Nameless novel Camoutflage. Several novels ago Pronzini changed the format of his Nameless books, not only alternating between first and third person but also letting Nameless' detective agency two other folks share the spotlight as well.

Pronzini opens the book with an introduction to client David Virden, a smarmy much-married man who needs Nameless to locate his first wife so that he can have the marriage annulled. Huh? Yes, Virden is now in the arms of a rich woman who wants to be married in the Catholic Church, hence the need for an annulment. (I'll spare you my Church bashing here.) Nameless proceeds on the case only to find himself entangled in a nasty spiderweb of deceit and terror. Along with the page-turning mystery, Pronzini give us indelible portraits of the people around the suddenly-missing Virden. Pronzini has a perfect ear and eye for the modern fears and foibles of average folks. He records what he sees and hears with pity, anger, humor and the honorable melancholy that marks so much of his work.

His partner Jake Runyon's case is personal. His girlfriend Bryn has reason to believe that her ex-husband is abusing their son physically but the boy is unwilling to discuss it. Like the Virden matter, a series of twists and turns takes Runyon and the reader into a dark and deadly place. Pronzini deals with these modern dilemmas without any of the TV shrink cliches we've come to expect, freeing himself to deal with the real horrors of how some children suffer in our society.

As for Tamara, the agency's black computer wizard and backbone, she really shines here backgrounding the Virden case with information that proves vital to Nameless finally realizing what's really going on.

The writing itself is pure pleasure. Over the years Pronzini has whittled his style to the bone without losing any of its punch or power. But as always with Pronzini, style serves story. What a style. What a story. Grab this book fast.

I dunno know about this

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JOHNNY DEPP TO REMAKE "THE THIN MAN" (from Cinema Retro)

Johnny Depp and director Rob Marshall will team for a remake of the classic mystery film The Thin Man. The original 1934 film starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as a married couple who dabble in solving murders and mysteries. The witty byplay between the two stars proved to be a sensation with audiences and spawned several sequels. It is not known who will be cast in the role of Nora Charles in the remake. (to see the original trailer go here and scroll down http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php

Ed here: As much as I respect and admire Johnny Depp's enormous talents I have grave doubts about trying to duplicate or best a masterpiece that owes its legend not just to its talented writer, director and stars but to the era in which it was created. That time was several planets removed from our contemporary world. If nothing else today we would look at Nick as an alcoholic and Nora as his winsome enabler. And the mugs and thugs who appear throughout the film...after The Sopranos (if not The Godfather) mugs and thugs aren't so much fun any more.

I think this is a real bad call.

Getting Away With Murder; Cover

Another great Getting Away With Murder from Mike Ripley is available now: http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/column_view...

-----------------My favorite cover of the moment (thanks to James Reasoner)

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Dave Zeltserman and Lee Goldberg

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The Myth of Publishing by Dave Zeltserman (first appeared in Jagged Edge)

When I was first starting out I believed I needed the validation from one of the large publishers to prove my books were worthy of being published. I was extremely naïve about the publishing industry then, and over the last five years I've learned quite a bit—I've also had every single book of mine rejected numerous time by the large NY publishers, and have instead have had six books published by the UK publisher, Serpent's Tail, two books by the independent publisher, Overlook Press and two books by Five Star. Of those books that were rejected flatly by NY's Big 6, one was picked by NPR as being one of the five best crime and mystery novels of 2008, two were picked by the Washington Post as best books of the year, and another was shortlisted by ALA for best horror book of 2010. I've won major awards, including a Shamus, I've had my books reviewed favorably by major newspapers around the world, and are seeing my books translated to French, German, Italian, Dutch and Lithuanian. One of my books has been optioned for film and should be going into production soon, and I just received an option offer for another book from a producer with a strong list of indie movies behind her. So what gives? If the large NY publishers are truly the gatekeepers of what's worthy, how come they're consistently rejecting me, yet my books keep getting significant acclaim? Well, as I said, over the five years I've learned more about how the industry works.

Let me talk about a few conversations I had with an editor when he was with St. Martin's. This editor called me after Small Crimes was picked by NPR, wanting to let me know how much he liked the book and how much he wanted to publish me. It turns out he was only playing me; waiting to see if I broke out with Small Crimes or one of my other books so he could then sign me to a deal, but even still, I learned a lot from our conversations about how the large publishers work. First off, according to this guy, the large NY houses are ruled by fear. Editors are terrified of recommending anything different to someone above them—afraid that their careers could be irreparably damaged if they recommended something that their superior considers a waste of time. Because of that only the safest books are recommended. Let's say an editor makes that leap and recommends a book that's different than the norm; they then have to lobby support to try to get the book bought—try to prove that the book has commercial viability. With one of my books—a horror novel—I had an editor at TOR spend six months trying to lobby support so he could buy this book, but the final nail in the coffin was when they had a focus group look at the book and it was decided that the book had some scenes that were too upsetting (imagine that—a horror novel having upsetting scenes!).

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I read this wonderful unpublished manuscript—a crime noir novel, The Dead Women of Juarez by Sam Hawken, and I told this editor at St. Martin's about it. It turns out the manuscript had gotten to him also, and he told me it was one of the best submitted novels he had read that year, but that there was little chance anyone in NY would publish it because it was too different. I ended up recommending the manuscript to my Serpent's Tail editor, who fell in love with it, and they're now publishing this book. That's the biggest difference between the large NY publishers and the smaller independents like SoHo Press, Akashic books, Overlook Press and Serpent's Tail—the mindset at these smaller independents is to buy the books they love and trust they'll find a readership, while the large NY houses making up the Big 6 have become all about buying what they consider the lowest risk books without any real regard to their quality, and even worse, they seem to have developed a very low opinion of the book buying public.



Here's another reality about publishing today—most authors now are given one or two books by the Big 6 to make it or they're done. It's almost impossible for an author to break out with only one or two books, at least not without a lot of money behind them. If you look at most of the big names in crime fiction today—Michael Connelly, James Ellroy, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos—none of these authors would've survived in today's environment. They all needed years to develop their readerships, yet new authors now aren't being given that luxury. More often than not it's one or two books, and then they're done.

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There might've been a time when the large NY houses acted as gatekeepers to what was worthy of being published, but the idea of them being any sort of gatekeeper now is only a myth. They've abdicated any role they might've once had about caring about the books they publish. Now it's all business, and nothing more than that. The independent publishers are different—they're out to publish the best books they can. They do this because nobody is going to be an independent publisher unless they truly love books, and they're also smart enough to know they need to do this to survive. But with the large publishers it's all bottom line, and it's all become very shortsighted.

Dave Zeltserman won the 2010 Shamus Award for 'Julius Katz' and is the acclaimed author of the 'man out of prison' crime trilogy: Small Crimes, Pariah and Killer, where Small Crimes (2008) and Pariah (2009) were both picked by the Washington Post as best books of the year. His recent The Caretaker of Lorne Field received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, calling it a 'superb mix of humor and horror', has been shortlisted by ALA for best horror novel of 2010, and was a finalist for a Black Quill Award for best dark genre book of the year. Outsourced (2011) has already been called 'a small gem of crime fiction' by Booklist and has been optioned by Impact Pictures and Constantin Film and is currently under development. Dave's latest book is the charming and fun mystery based on the characters from his award-winning stories, 'Julius Katz and Archie'.

-----THE WALK

Ed here: Let me say that The Walk, as I said in a review here not too long ago, is one of the most intriguing exciting and character-rich novels I've read in a long time. This is Lee Goldberg at the top of his game. You'd be crazy not to buy this for 99 cents. Seriously. This is a grim, funny, sad, frightening, melancholy novel that you won'tbe able to stop reading. I sure couldn't. And yu get TWO books for that price.

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From Lee Goldberg:

It was two years ago today that, at Joe Konrath's urging, I began my "Kindle Experiment" by making my out-of-print book THE WALK available as an ebook. I've sold close to 20,000 copies of THE WALK since then...and to celebrate, and in a blatant to attempt to propel THE WALK into the top 100 on Amazon for the first time, I am selling the book for just 99 cents for the next week.

But to make the offer even sweeter, and to promote my original ebook series THE DEAD MAN, anyone who emails me proof of purchase (at lee@leegoldberg.com) will get a free copy of FACE OF EVIL. That's two books for just 99 cents.


Here's the link to THE WALK on Amazon...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Walk-ebook/...

Pre-Pub Reviews: Axel Brand, The Dead Genius by Richard Wheeler

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Ed here: I'd like to thank Ron Scheer for letting me reprint his review of the Axel Brand novel from his excellent website Buddies in The Saddle.


Axel Brand, The Dead Genius Axel Brand a/k/a Richard Wheeler

Someone finds a dead body slumped over a desk. No sign of foul play. The examining physician says heart failure. Police detective Lt. Joe Sonntag is inclined to agree.

But his cheap-cigar-smoking captain Ackerman thinks otherwise. There's a crime here somewhere, he keeps saying. Find it. And thus a skeptical Sonntag finds himself on another hunt for a murderer.

What I like about Axel Brand mysteries is the retro world of police work circa 1949 that it conjures. And the naked city his police call home is not the mean streets of New York, Chicago or LA. It's the mainly placid Milwaukee, the beer capital of the Midwest.

Axel Brand, The Dead Genius

Someone finds a dead body slumped over a desk. No sign of foul play. The examining physician says heart failure. Police detective Lt. Joe Sonntag is inclined to agree.

But his cheap-cigar-smoking captain Ackerman thinks otherwise. There's a crime here somewhere, he keeps saying. Find it. And thus a skeptical Sonntag finds himself on another hunt for a murderer.

What I like about Axel Brand mysteries is the retro world of police work circa 1949 that it conjures. And the naked city his police call home is not the mean streets of New York, Chicago or LA. It's the mainly placid Milwaukee, the beer capital of the Midwest.

I also like Joe Sonntag. He's a hard-working, decent man, who wears inexpensive suits and rides a streetcar to work. At night he returns, often late, to his wife Lizbeth, a drink, and meatloaf. It's an empty nest, one son grown and gone. The other son only a memory of a boy who thrived and then died of polio.

His marriage is a mostly comfortable one, though not without signs of strain. For lack of a job of her own, Joe's wife takes more than passing interest in his work. You get the idea she wouldn't make a bad cop herself. She settles for packing his lunch every morning and the occasional night out on his meager salary. On Sunday she goes to church alone.

The crime is a nicely complex one, with just enough discoveries along the way to keep it intriguing. We meet three of Joe's colleagues, who are assigned by Ackerman to the case. One is Frank Silva, who reads pulp westerns and is a young socialist with a vocal dislike for rich capitalists.

The dead genius of the title is a questioned document examiner. Often called upon as an expert witness, he could tell if a document was what it claimed to be. He could testify whether or not a will was forged. He could spot a phony contract, or a bogus signature. A walking encyclopedia of typewriter fonts, he could identify the year and make of the machine used to type a letter.

For all who knew him, he was also a man of mystery, claiming a past too far-fetched to be true and dying without heirs. The pieces won't fit together, and there are those who might have had reason to do the man in. There's a disgruntled protégé with a desire to take over the business, and a doctor and lawyer in an unseemly hurry to cremate the remains.

Richard Wheeler (writing as Axel Brand) has said in an interview that he enjoys the police detective tradition as it was portrayed in Dragnet. This realistic police procedural started out as a radio series in 1948 and quickly transferred to television in the 1950s. (Read more here.)

Sonntag is not Joe Friday. The tone isn't deadpan, but more like my favorite TV cop show, Barney Miller, which ran 1975-1982. (Read more here.) There's humor and quirks among the men on the force, and Joe has a hidden side that haunts him each time he rides the streetcar between home and work.

Far from hard-boiled, maybe soft-boiled is what you call this kind of crime fiction. It's love of its characters and the pitch-perfect evocation of the period make it thoroughly enjoyable. I hope Richard Wheeler has a whole lot more Joe Sonntag stories up his sleeve.

The Dead Genius will be released in August and is now available for pre-order at amazon.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: The Naked Spur (1953)

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe
There's a long, mesmerizing picee about Poe in the New Yorker by Jill Lepore. To me anyway--extraordinary that she could pack so much information and opinion in the space she was given. I've read full-length biographies of Poe that weren't as illuminating. From 2009

Jill Lepore:

"When Edgar was two, his mother died of consumption. Edgar and a brother and sister had little more to depend upon than the charity of strangers. The Poe orphans were separated, and Edgar landed in the home of a wealthy Richmond merchant named John Allan and his sickly, childless wife, Fanny. Allan, who ran a firm called the House of Ellis, never adopted the boy, and never loved him, either. Poe, for his part, took Allan's name but never wanted it. (He signed letters, and published, as "Edgar A. Poe.") In 1815, Allan moved his family to London, to take advantage of the booming British market for Virginia tobacco. Poe attended posh boarding schools. Then, during the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, banks failed, factories closed, and Allan's business imploded. Allan, plagued with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, returned to Virginia. Poe turned poet. The earliest verses in his hand that survive were written when he was fifteen: "Last night, with many cares and toils oppress'd, / Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest." Adolescent melancholy, and nothing more. But on the same sheet of paper, just below Poe's scrawl, Allan had calculated the compound interest on a debt.

(more)

""I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth," Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.) In 1830, he finally made it to West Point, where he pulled pranks. "I cannot believe a word he writes," Allan wrote on the back of yet another letter from his wayward charge. Poe was court-martialled, and after that Allan, who had since married a woman twenty years his junior, cut him off entirely. Poe went to New York, but, unable to support himself by writing, he left the city within three months, returning to Baltimore to live with Mrs. Clemm and little Virginia. He published his first story, "Metzengerstein," about a doomed Hungarian baron, his gloomy castle, and his fiery steed. He won a prize of fifty dollars from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for "MS Found in a Bottle." One of the editors, who met him, later wrote, "I found him in Baltimore in a state of starvation." In these straits, Poe wrote "Berenice," a story about a man who disinters his dead lover and yanks out all her teeth—"the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice"—only to realize that she is still alive. It has been claimed, plausibly, that Poe wrote this story to make a very bad and long-winded joke about "bad taste." Also: he was hungry."

for the rest go here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...
posted by Ed Gorman @ 2:26 PM 3 comments links to this post
SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 2009

New Books: THE END OF BROOKLYN by Robert J. Randisi

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From Robert J. Randisi:

The thing about Nick Delvecchio is that he sprang into being fully formed. When I wrote NO EXIT FROM BROOKLYN in 1987, there he was. His personality, his family history, all fully in tact. The second book, THE DEAD OF BROOKLYN, came out in 1991. Both of those books are now available from Ramble House Press (http://www.ramblehouse.com/).

And now there's THE END OF BROOKLYN, 20 years later. (Couldn't call it "The 20 years Later Affair." Sounded too much like a Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie.)

The third Delvecchio has existed for some time in one form or another. In my mind, in my drawer (for a long time), in my computer, but the time never seemed right to publish it. I went on to other things—anthologies, many westerns, other series—but the third Delvecchio was always there, on the fringes. I thought about it, worked on it, when I had the time. As time went by I realized that by the time I did get it published it would be a "historical,"—set in the 90's where the series had left off.

I never conceived the Delvecchio series as a trilogy. In fact, none of my series have ever run a planned length. There were 6 Miles Jacoby books, 5 Joe Keough books, 3 Gil & Claire Hunt" books, 2 Dennis McQueen books, 1 Henry Po book (a lot of short stories, though, to keep old Hank alive). There's been a half dozen or so Truxton Lewis stories, 4 or 5 stories featuring 1920's P.I. Val O'Farrell. There'll be books in those series eventually. More books in ALL those series, if I have my day. None of them have ended.

This, however, this is the last Nick Delvecchio.

I liked the idea of having the last one published by a small press. My friend John Boland had started his perfect Crime imprint, and I had published a short story collection, THE GUILT EDGE, and a stand alone, THE BOTTOM OF EVERY BPOTTLE, with him. When I told him I had a third Delvecchio that was looking for a home he said, "Let's do it!"

I hauled it out and dusted it off, saw that it needed to be framed. I wrote a prologue and epilogue that take place in present day, and let the rest of the book stand on its own—with, like I said, a little dusting off.

The result, so far, is a starred Booklist review that said, "The final entry in Randisi's Brooklyn trilogy is dark, brooding, and thoroughly compelling [with] . . . clever plotting and an engaging narrative voice. Randisi has written hundreds of crime stories and earned numerous awards. This is among his finest efforts." (Wes Lukowsky, Booklist, May 2011).

Delvecchio is still Delvechio. Family man, man with a conscience, a man who cares. Give it a read. It's the last one. I swear. Three and out. Now, I've got these others series that need to be wrapped up . . .